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“Meetings are a waste of time unless you are closing a deal,” Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and CEO of HDNet.

“Cancel the regular status meetings. They're like vacuums. Even if there is nothing to discuss, people will invent things just to fill the time.” Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting.

A lot has been said about the photo that Facebook's Marc Zuckerberg's sister Randi inadvertently sent to the world. Everyone's talking about her rant, Facebook privacy policies, warning people about postings, and frankly, I really couldn't have cared less.

When I was travelling with my family in the tropical Far East a few years back (fine, it was 10 years ago -- don't rub it in), my daughter, then 5 years old, came up to me while I was shaving and said, "Daddy! Turn off the water while you're shaving, you're wasting water." I looked at her, proud of her environmental awareness and said, "They don't have a water problem here like we do back home." And without batting an eye, she replied, "But they will, because of you!"

I am a Yahoo! holdout. I have been using MyYahoo as a source of news feeds (RSS) for years -- over a decade, I believe. It was easy, comfortable, and their news site was (and still is) extremely user friendly. I often preferred Yahoo Sports to ESPN or SI. It was even my home page for a while, before having one home page became obsolete -- now I have multiple home pages, and it's not one of them.

For those of you who followed the SOPA / PIPA saga, know that, at least for now, the Internet has defeated the Congressional Hollywood lobbyists and the "public servants" they have in their deep pockets. It's a good thing and we should all be proud. As a Sociologist I am well aware of the flaws of that statement, but it serves as a good introduction to what I really want to discuss, and that is the Internet Consumer -- both the consumer of what the Internet has to offer, and the traditional consumer who basically uses the tools of the Internet to consume.

Please write your Congressman to stop this draconian bill. SOPA and PIPA are a terribly misguided attempts to stop piracy by people who really don't know much about the Internet and/or possibly personal freedoms.

When I wrote TranceNational AlienNation, my thesis that researches Trance Music culture in Israel and discusses the moral panic that ensues and targets the global trance community, I was surprised to find how easily people are whipped into a frenzy of panic by seemingly innocent events. Raves, drugs, youth culture in general, have all been targets of moral panics.